“Lord, please, protect us and help us,” her friend prayed, loud enough for Sumrall to hear over the gun blasts on screen and in the theater.

It seemed at first like an extension of “The Dark Knight Rises” itself, survivors recalled — an armed madman’s dramatic entrance in a cloud of smoke, timed perfectly with the movie’s own first shootout 15 minutes into the action.

“My gosh, some jerk has thrown a stupid prank, and now I’m going to miss the movie,” Sumrall remembered thinking at first, as she watched what looked like a spewing smoke bomb roll across the floor in front of the screen.

“Then we start hearing pops, and I’m thinking — firecrackers!”

Moviegoers described the first moments of yesterday’s Dark Knight massacre as a surreal mash-up of actual and cinematic carnage.

Some wondered at first if it was a promotion. Was it some idiot fan in a costume? A special effect?

But as a neuroscience grad student named James Eagen Holmes — wearing a helmet, gas mask and body armor — fired a shot into the ceiling, and advanced, shooting up the packed theater’s center stairs, they realized death itself was stalking them.

“You could not see anything but the person’s eyes,” moviegoer Corbin Dates told a local TV reporter.

“He looked like he was a member of SWAT — he was fully geared out, fully decked out in guns,” remembered Kenneth “Tre” Freeman, 18, who was sitting in the fourth row.

“And then you just start hearing ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom!’ And people start screaming and running,” remembered Sumrall, a Baton Rouge, La., native who’d stopped in Aurora while traveling home from Seattle.

She and her friend, Pourciau, who would be shot in the lower leg, had gone to the midnight premiere on a lark.

Even then, she didn’t think the bullets could be real — “until I got out,” Sumrall said, “and saw people bleeding.”